On Friday night, after a three-hour weather delay, passengers boarded a Beijing-bound flight in Dhaka, Bangladesh that had a stopover in Kunming, a provincial capital in southwest China. Scheduled to leave Kunming at 8:45 p.m., the connecting flight was delayed until 11 p.m. by additional poor weather. This did not make the passengers happy. Several refused to board and demanded compensation, but by 1:45 a.m. the airline had persuaded everyone to board.
上周五晚，一架由達卡經停昆明飛往北京的班機由于天氣原因延誤了三小時，本應晚上8:45從昆明起飛的飛機因為惡劣的天氣條件一直拖延到了晚上11點，這讓旅客非常不高興，一些旅客拒絕登機并要求賠償，直到凌晨1:45，機場工作人員才勸服所有乘客登上飛機。

But that wasn't the end of the passengers' problems. After they boarded, the airport staff had to clear snow from the runway, which took over an hour. Finally, the plane began to taxi at 3:15 p.m.—15 minutes after the pilot inexplicably shut off the air conditioning. When passengers complained, the pilot reportedly asked: "Are you going to die soon? If not, just wait." Two passengers then burst open the emergency exits, which resulted in their arrests.
但是事情并未到此停止，乘客登機后，機場工作人員對跑道進行除冰，這又耽誤了1個。之后機長又莫名關掉了空調，15分鐘以后3點15分，飛機才終于起飛。據稱當時有乘客在抱怨，機長聽到后大叫：“你要死了么，不死就等著！”于是，有兩名乘客打開了安全門，不過隨即被警方逮捕。

The journalist Matt Sheehan, who in 2013 described a Chinese airport melee in hugely entertaining fashion, told MSNBC that “Chinese people have just begun waking up to this idea that as a consumer you're entitled to certain protections, but they don't have any of the institutions like consumer rights groups that do this professionally.”
2013年，記者馬特·希恩在描述發(fā)生在中國機場的一次騷亂時，說道：“中國人們才剛剛意識到作為消費者，有些權利是受到保護的，可是他們卻沒有保障消費者群體利益的專業(yè)機構。”

Airlines—and the airline industry—are a useful lens for viewing China's development as a whole. In his excellent book China Airborne, Atlantic national correspondent and aviation buff James Fallows described how China is attempting to condense a century's worth of developments in aviation into a few decades. This breakneck pace has resulted in a dazzling array of new airports scattered across the country, but has included some serious growing pains.
其實，航空公司以及整個航空業(yè)的發(fā)展很好地反映了中國的整體發(fā)展狀況?！洞笪餮笤驴返挠浾咄瑫r也是航空迷的詹姆斯·法洛斯，在他的書中描述了中國是如何把長達一個世紀的航空發(fā)展過程壓縮到幾十年的過程的。這種發(fā)展過快的方式造成的后果除了層出不窮的各地新建機場，同時還有與此相伴的各種問題、矛盾和陣痛。